Jonas Mekas
- 1969Walden
- 1972Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
- 2000As I Was Moving Ahead
Fed intoAnthology Film Archives
He filmed his own life in quick bursts for seventy years and built the institutions that kept avant-garde film alive.
Mekas survived a forced-labour camp and displaced-persons camps before reaching New York in 1949. He bought a Bolex within weeks and began filming everything around him: friends, parties, snow in the park, the people of the downtown scene.
Those fragments became his diary films, edited years later into long, singing collages like Walden and As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty. They're shaky, fast, sentimental and joyous, and they made the personal film a form of its own.
He was also the scene's great organiser. He wrote a film column for The Village Voice, co-founded the Film-Makers' Cooperative in 1962 and opened Anthology Film Archives in 1970. He died in 2019.
Films
Where to start with Jonas Mekas, in the order they were made. Runtimes are approximate.
Walden
Subtitled Diaries, Notes and Sketches. Footage from 1964 to 1968: weddings, Warhol, the Velvet Underground, snow in Central Park, cut fast and set to music and Mekas's voice.
Reminiscences of a Journey to Lithuania
Mekas returns to his home village after 27 years away and films his mother, then visits Elmshorn, near Hamburg, where he was held in a forced-labour camp during the war.
As I Was Moving Ahead Occasionally I Saw Brief Glimpses of Beauty
Nearly five hours of home movies of his family life from the 1970s to the 1990s, with Mekas talking over them.
Echoed in
Where Mekas's ideas turned up next.
